Is Elon Musk’s loathing of Starmer the largest menace to the ‘particular relationship’ between Britain and the US? TOM LEONARD reveals why Trump ‘would possibly get pleasure from making Labour’s life a bit of more durable

If there were any doubts about what Elon Musk thinks of Labour‘s Britain, the Silicon Valley tycoon has put them firmly to bed.

Last week, Musk – who claims that posting relentlessly on the social media site X is part of his duties as its owner – launched a days-long stream of invective about the state of modern Britain.

‘What is happening in the UK?’ he wailed to his 206 million X followers, in response to a post claiming a British government report warned that reading The Lord Of The Rings and 1984 ‘could lead to Right-wing extremism’.

Musk also shared a picture of a snarling John Bull character in a Union Flag top hat. It appeared alongside a story about the UK Government assuming ‘sweeping control’ over US technology companies.

Before that, he posted: ‘The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state’ as he reacted to news that a poll – which he has enthusiastically supported – calling for a new UK General Election had reached a million signatures. Musk repeatedly shared a graphic showing Sir Keir Starmer‘s popularity ratings plummeting.

The UK’s ‘establishment parties are going to get crushed at the next election’, he predicted in another post.

Indeed, on Thursday a Right-wing account on X posted the news that Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a minister in Boris Johnson‘s government who lost her seat in the Labour landslide, had defected to Reform and will be a candidate in a mayoral election next year. The tweet: ‘Reform will win the next General Election.’ Musk reposted it with the word ‘Yes’.

Now it seems the man who – worryingly for Downing Street – has been hailed as the single most influential figure in the emerging Trump White House and ‘America’s most powerful private citizen’ is planning to put his money where his bellicose mouth is.

At the weekend, it was reported that Musk is preparing to give $100 million (£78 million) to Reform leader Nigel Farage as a ‘f*** you Starmer payment’.

Insiders fear such a move could obliterate the Conservative Party and open the door to near-limitless anti-government advertisements from Reform.

Musk’s disdain for Labour and Starmer (whom he calls ‘two-tier Keir’, championing the claim that British police deal less harshly with violence perpetrated by non-white offenders) is all the more significant given that he now has the ear of President-elect Trump; a president whose policy decisions – it was said during his first term – depended on who had last spoken to him.

The head of Tesla and SpaceX will be responsible for hacking back wastage as part of his specially-created job as co-head of a new Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration. And since Trump reportedly has little love for a Labour leadership that has routinely insulted him, could Musk’s first ‘efficiency’ be to persuade his friend to stop wasting time on the ‘Special Relationship’?

‘More than anyone else right now, Trump appears to be listening to Elon,’ a senior Team Trump insider told the Mail. ‘So could some of his animosity for Starmer filter through? Sure.

‘But you must remember that Trump has always respected the British people and their institutions – especially the Royal Family. I can’t imagine he would do anything that would harm our Special Relationship in the long term. In the short term, he might enjoy making Starmer’s life a little harder.’

The UK Government has been at pains to downplay any rift with the incoming Trump administration, which takes over on January 20. But a senior official in his first administration told the Mail that Downing Street shouldn’t take too much for granted.

‘Trump is transactional, he’s a deal-maker – with whoever’s in Downing Street,’ said the insider. ‘He knows that as President, he has to work closely with Britain. But he’d prefer to be doing deals with the Conservatives and he clearly doesn’t like the Labour government. And now he’s got Musk telling him he’s right not to like them.

‘He got on well with Boris Johnson but I don’t see the same happening with Starmer. He won’t want to do Labour any favours if he can help it.’

However, both Trump and Musk have particular reason to resent the Starmer Government that goes beyond their instinctive contempt for its embrace of woke policies.

For Trump, one need look no further than the stream of pious abuse that’s come his way from senior Labour politicians. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in 2018, called him a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’. A year earlier, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, opined that ‘Trump is such an odious, sad, little man – imagine being proud to have that as your President’.

And then there was Ed Miliband, Energy Security, saying in 2016: ‘The idea that we have shared values with a racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper beggars belief.’

The Labour Party’s tone-deaf decision to help organise nearly 100 members to volunteer for the Kamala Harris campaign hardly helped matters and prompted a complaint to the US Federal Election Commission from the Trump campaign about ‘blatant foreign interference’.

Musk, meanwhile, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, is already embroiled in an ongoing scrap over social media standards.

After the summer riots in the UK, which he was accused of stoking, the Labour Government promised to strengthen the Online Safety Act, which could be bad news for X.

This battle escalated last month when it was revealed that Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, had once served as director of a Labour-linked online campaign group that had vowed to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an Anglo-American outfit that shares a north London address with Labour Together, a think-tank closely associated with the Labour Party, had reportedly sought meetings with Democrat senators while lobbying to remove Musk from behind the wheel of X.

Responding to claims that the CCDH was a ‘political front’ for the Labour Party, Musk posted on X: ‘This is war.’

Although he has denied it, some believe Musk was also angered by the Starmer Government’s decision in September not to invite him to a UK investment summit because of his social media posts during the riots – although Musk, who is notoriously thin-skinned, insists he didn’t want to go anyway.

But it has been reported that Musk’s final switch to supporting the Republicans, having been what his father Errol described as a ‘flaming Democrat’, came when Biden didn’t invite him to a White House event in 2021 for electric car makers – despite Tesla being the biggest of them in the US.

Did Downing Street make the same fatal error by leaving his name off a guest list?

Musk’s beef with Britain is far removed from the heady days of 2012 when he was seen pedalling around London on a Boris Bike. ‘I really like Britain!’ he told his social media followers.

And he has strong ties with us: Errol’s mother, Cora Robinson, was born in Liverpool and Errol spent much of his childhood living near Bristol. ‘We’ve always liked the UK. I took Elon there when he was six but we don’t relate to what’s happening there now,’ he told the Mail last month.

Even though he grew up in South Africa, Musk had Anglophile tastes: the two books he devoured as a child and were, he says, hugely influential – The Lord Of The Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – were written by British writers JRR Tolkien and Douglas Adams.

In January, he dispelled a common assumption that he is of Afrikaner heritage, comparing himself to Tolkien, in a social media post: ‘I am from a British/English background, not an Afrikaner background (similar to JRR Tolkien, who was also born in South Africa).’

Hardly the behaviour of a compulsive Anglophobe. Nor was marrying (twice) British actress Talulah Riley after meeting the star of the St Trinian’s films in a London nightclub.

In 2013, Musk wrote: ‘Always admired Margaret Thatcher. She was tough, but sensible & fair, much like my English Nana. Britain went from dreary to Great again.’

Trump has even stronger British links as his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born and raised in poverty in the Outer Hebrides before finding a new life – and Trump’s father, Fred – in the US. Donald often boasts of his Scottish heritage. 

Anthony Scaramucci, who was once his White House PR chief, claimed last month that the Trump camp’s row with Labour won’t affect US-UK relations.

‘Trump knows he has to have a good relationship with the Brits, and Trump likes the Brits,’ he said. ‘He’s an Anglophile. He loved the interaction that he had with the Queen. He’s a royalist . . . so he wants to have a good relationship with the UK.’

However, some fear that Musk will do his level best to ensure that good relationship comes with strings attached.

Labour may be cheered by recent reports that Musk has clashed with members of Trump’s top team, including having a ‘massive blow-up’ with one of them at a Mar-a-Lago dinner. Two planet-sized egos cannot co-exist for long, say sceptics about the Trump-Musk bromance.

But others counter that Trump cannot afford to fall out with the man who controls the most powerful information platform in US politics – and has been one of his biggest financial backers.

The view in the more rarefied corners of the UK Government may be that Elon Musk is simply beyond the pale but, two years after he was dismissed as stupid for paying $44 billion for Twitter, it would be a huge mistake to ever bet against him.